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Easyduino: Open Source PCB Devboards for KiCad

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Why This Matters

The Easyduino project provides open-source, standardized PCB designs for popular microcontroller devboards, promoting easier customization and manufacturing using KiCad. This initiative helps unify diverse hardware standards, making it more accessible for developers and hobbyists to create and modify their own boards with modern features like USB-C support. It ultimately fosters innovation, reduces costs, and streamlines the development process in the embedded systems community.

Key Takeaways

Easyduino: Repository of Open Source PCB Devboards for KiCad

The Easyduino project is an effort to easily dive into different PCB designs of the most popular microcontroller devboards like Arduino, ESP32, Raspberry Pico and STM32 Bluepill (more to come!). Using the free and Open Source Software KiCad and adhering the best practices across the PCB and KiCad ecosystem. Also adding the much needed USB-C support!

The project was born out of the necessity to unify the wide variety of software, languages and conventions used in the most popular devboards. For example Arduino Uno was developed in 2010, Italy, using Eagle. The ESP32 devboard was developed in 2016, China, using Altium. The Raspberry Pi Pico 2040 was developed around 2021 in the U.K. using KiCad and Altium...

Available Development Boards

The outline, pinout, layout and components have been tried to be replicated with respect to the originals, in all of the boards. With various levels of success.

Some boards, like the Raspberry Pi Pico use 01005 components which are too expensive for the manufacturer to integrate in the PCB Aseembly line. Some other components like the original Arduino UNO USB to Serial converter, an Atmega16u2, were hard to come by during the development of this project ~January 2023, so more readily available options were chosen. All the differences with the original boards are explained inside the folder of each project in a readme file.

4 layers of copper have been used in all projects to simplify the wiring. Specifically the JLC04161H-7628 stackup.

The PCB constraints of the manufacturer JLCPCB are explained here

Structure of each project

Each project consists of:

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